This is a thread about the pronunciation of old or Middle English, and by extension Tudor English, from an ignorant skeptic on the matter who wishes to be better informed by those who have studied it more closely.

Nowadays we know that the spelling of a word is not a definite guide to the way it is pronounced. As I understand it, the assumption is that in the days before standardised spellings and dictionaries, spelling was regional, reflecting local pronunciation, and therefore more or less phonetic.

But is it true that pronunciation followed spelling? I am not entirely sure this works, for several reasons. Even within the same work written by the same person, the same word may be written several different ways. This surely vastly reduces our chances of knowing how anything would have been pronounced? Surely if spelling itself was non-standard and unreliable even within the same text, then our chances of ascertaining pronunciation must be low?

Nowadays, we have technology to record people's voices to hear how people pronounce words, in ways we could never guess if we couldn't hear them. How then, can we possibly know what Middle English sounded like when we have no chance of ever hearing it spoken? Is 'authentic pronunciation' of Middle English and Tudor English an unattainable dream, or are there rules of thumb we can know with some certainty?

The few examples I have come across of reasoning for Elizabethan pronunciation (for example), have left me very skeptical of the whole endevour. John Dowland, for example, wrote a piece called 'Semper Dowland, Semper Dolens' - always Dowland, always doleful. I read an article that argued this was a clue that Dowland would have been pronounced Doe-land to rhyme with dolens, but this surely rests on the completely unsafe assumption that this was a perfect rather than imperfect rhyme? Are other assumptions about pronunciation safer?

Any informed contributions would be most welcome, including the correction of any errors I may have made in this opening post.

Cheers all

Stower